I can honestly say I never thought I’d be doing a blog post about clothes. Definitely not my ‘thing’ however this little #nojeansjuly venture is taking on fairly epic proportions in our house (we live exciting lives as you can tell) and has some high stakes for us both. It's also going to be on my Instagram feed a lot in the coming weeks so I figured I ought to explain it rather than let people think I’ve suddenly become obsessed by dresses and monitoring Rex’s toy use.
It all began by watching ‘Consumed’ the Netflix series. Yes, it’s a bit naff but don’t judge me it’s had a brilliant effect on Rex. I could lie and pretend I knew that would be the case but I didn’t. I was just looking for something that wasn’t Pokemon or Star Wars to watch with him. Desperate times etc. But as it happens the moral of the programme, that having less possessions gives you more freedom and energy, really hit home with us both. We’re by no means consumed by stuff and the house is pretty tidy but I do spend a lot of time and energy keeping it that way. We have a four bed house in London and so I have the space to hold on to memories via possessions, perhaps more than I should. We both think it would be nice to have less tidying to do and therefore more time to 'do stuff’ together like baking or making crafts. We don't do these things nearly as often as we would like so creating that extra time together is our motivation.
We made a plan of attack. Having discussed what we thought the most challenging areas would be to clear out we decided to go straight for them; in at the deep end! The biggest and most potentially problematic areas were his toys and my clothes. So a few weeks ago we both had an initial shot at sorting these items; throwing some and putting others aside for charity. Immediately following this I made the VERY obvious mistake of suggesting that he hadn’t put enough toys in the charity box. Lord knows what possessed me to say that because his immediate, predictable and entirely fair response was that I hadn’t got rid of enough clothes. And eventually I was forced to admit he had a point. I don’t think I’d even put 25% of my clothes in the charity pile. I don’t buy huge amounts of clothes but I very rarely get rid of any. I still have plenty of clothes from university when I had a love of hot pants and sequins…... So there is definitely potential for me to be tougher and donate/dump lots more. Rex decided to ‘help me’ by putting all of my (many) dresses in the charity box. Pointing out (again very fairly) that I only really wear jeans so I didn’t need to keep the dresses. Funnily enough despite him (annoyingly) being right again this approach didn’t really work for me (in fact it made me feel really pressured and stressed despite knowing he couldn’t exactly take the box anywhere so my dresses were perfectly safe!). Yes, 99% of the time I can be found in jeans even at work but I do love dresses and lots of them hold memories for me. For some reason, that I'd never noticed or considered before this conversation, I save dresses for holidays and balls, which basically means I have about five dresses to wear every day of my two weeks holiday a year and ten times more ball dresses than I will ever need. Rex accused me of having hundreds of dresses, which obviously I don’t….but having counted I do have 74. Which still feels a lot for a woman who always wears jeans…
So when Rex challenged me to only keep the dresses I wore for the next month I agreed……on the proviso he can only keep the toys that he has played with in July too. He also agreed! We've had several discussions as I wanted to be 100% sure he understood the consequences. The last time I raised it he actually became a little irate with me and asked if it was me that didn't understand and was worried. Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to find a loop hole. The longer I've had something the harder I find it to let go however useless or outdated the item might be (I have a polaroid camera and an MP3 player, which I think says it all...).
Its a good thing Rex is so wedded to the idea and holding me accountable because I woke up this morning on 1 July, the first day of the challenge, and immediately put on jeans to take him to school. Rex pointed it out as we were walking and told me if I changed before collection he'd still allow it to count! (He's subsequently come out with a few rules and parameters - his autistic side does love to discuss and define rules!) So I did change, meaning one dress is safe! (Only 73 to go...)
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